Lighting the Bonfire of Your Imagination

We have survived the longest night of the year—again. Many people still light bonfires on Winter Solstice night. Bring greens in the house to encourage the sun to return. Light candles. Put lights on the evergreen trees. They’re waiting upon the darkness.

This is an act of the imagination. Imagination and the symbol generating capacity of the psyche are inextricably related in a way I’m still trying to understand. Someone postulated that it wasn’t an opposable thumb, and therefore tool-making ability, that led to human development, but our capacity to make symbols. I think that capacity emerged from our visual, pre-verbal experiencing of the world.  I see a tree, though I have no word for it. It has fruit. Limbs I can climb to escape a predator. Without words, I see the tree and come to associate it with food and safety. This was the arising of symbolic thinking.

In the spirit of the bonfires burning to wait upon the dark last night, we can also set a fire to light our imaginations. I’ve been a writer since the second grade, but only in the last four years have my imaginative abilities truly taken flight. And I know why. I began to record and watch my dreams.

Dreams arise out of the dark, out of that pre-verbal symbol making place in our psyche. Dreams are pure metaphor. Gob-smackingly original. As I watched my dreams and saw over time how the symbols and metaphors developed, my ability to think metaphorically grew exponentially. It was set on fire. I was exercising the fundamental “muscle” where all writing arises from—all poetry, fairy tales, myth, and story. 

I am perpetually awed at the abundance and richness going on way down deep. How much I had missed before I began paying attention. Dreams and myth are hard to understand—at first. The language of symbol and metaphor is really a foreign language to our conscious, rational minds. Like any foreign language, it has to be learned. If any artist, any person, takes the time to learn this language, to wait upon the long dark night, I promise that your imagination will blaze bonfire bright. 

“If you wait upon the silence, it is not silent. 

And when you wait upon the darkness, it is luminous.” 

--CG Jung. Collected Works Volume 17

7:30 BELLS Guest Post:: "Risk is When the Bells Chime Loudest" by author Margery Cuyler

Following is a wonderful post from author and legendary children's book editor Margery Cuyler.  I had the high honor of having worked with her on several of my  fantasy novels. 

I hear bells chiming when I experience what I like to refer to as a “mandorla” experience. Mandorla is the Italian word for “almond,” and the almond shape has been interpreted by Carl Jung, Robert Johnson, and other psychologists as a symbol for the overlap of two contrasting, opposing forces that occur simultaneously. When one finds oneself standing in the center of the overlap or mandorla, one feels extreme tension, but . . . that tension of the opposites can lead to transformation and renewal. One can sense that God is present in those moments of suffering, and if one is patient, if one prays and trusts, the solution will usually emerge. 

This mandorla experience has happened every time I’ve been at a crossroads in my life: to leave or not leave a loved one who provides a safety net, to go from being single to being married, to become a mother of three even while working full time, to change jobs when a new job opportunity challenges one’s comfort level, and so on. These mandorlas that punctuate life involve risk. But risk is when the bells chime the loudest! 

 And how about the mandorla experience in a writer’s life? For me, I decided recently to leave the safe haven of writing picture books, which have defined me as an author, to writing a YA (still in progress). As I wobble into the territory of character development, I am discovering that my characters have to experience the mandorla. What is at stake for them? How do they experience two different emotions at once? What causes them to change? The mandorla is a writer’s place. Don’t all writers try to make sense of the fragmented world in which we live? Don’t our characters long for a place where they can finally settle and experience unity? Can I, as a fiction writer, reach that place of synthesis by the end of a manuscript? 

Great writers have accomplished such leaps as they’ve united the beauty and the terror of existence. Their talent and psychological insight, their characters’ verisimilitude, can surprise and shock--can teach that the tension of opposites, the mandorla experience, is the stuff of good writing. I may never get there, but at least I’m exploring new literary territory, and that’s exciting!

Margery Cuyler has been part of the children’s book field for the past 45 years. Aside from holding executive positions at Holiday House, Golden Books Family Entertainment, Macmillan, Marshall Cavendish, and Amazon Children’s Publishing, she has written 49 children’s books and has a 50th book under contract with Random House. She retired from full-time publishing at the end of 2013 and is currently consulting, writing, and doing school visits. She and her husband, the parents of two grown sons, live in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Margery also has a stepdaughter who paints pets for a living. They are really cool. For more information about Margery, visit www.margerycuyler.com

7:30 BELLS Posts run every Tuesday.